in the times after
by Taivasalla
Summary: Sasuke isn't the only one who lost everyone in the Uchiha massacre. One-shot.


**Disclaimer**: _Naruto_ and associated concepts are not mine. Yasu is mine, along with any other characters you don't recognize.  
**Premise**: When an entire clan dies, hundreds of people, Sasuke can't be the only one who loses someone precious.  
Yasu has been in my head for a long time. This may not do her full justice, but it's a start.

* * *

in the times after

Yasu can't stand the thought of going home. In her mind, he's still there on her threshold, his blade catching the moonlight, pinning her bleeding to the wall. In her mind, she feels the life dying inside her. The images sink sharp hooks and twist her down; the daylight fades at the edges until all she can see is the redness of his eyes. Yasu spins and punches a brick wall with all her strength and no chakra. Skin splits and something fractures deep in her hand. The day rushes back and she pants in tiny sobs. She can't go home.

So she wanders. It's been nearly a month, but the village is still subdued. Crowds are bruised with mourning black. The black-and-bone is out in force; they aren't trying to hide, but civilians and shinobi alike avert their eyes, and it is as if the ANBU are invisible. The threat of martial law hangs over even the heads of the law-abiding. No one wants to make a mistake and disappear, gripped between two of the faceless black-and-bone, to reappear in a stifling, chakra-damped cell facing down a monster in a steel grey uniform. Fear lays thick in the air; even the children are reticent.

She wanders until she ends up in front of the Uchiha compound. She'd come here with Toshio a few times; always as his teammate, never his lover. "They'll get all traditional on our asses," Toshio had complained when she asked him if they were going to tell his parents today. "Want a big family wedding. And then you'll have to deal with my mum as a mother-in-law!" He buried his nose in her just-brushed hair and laughed. Yasu shook him free and pulled her hair up into a tight knot, fixing it in place with crossing senbon. She patted her bangs down, swept to the left.

"Gods forbid," she muttered, and zipped up her vest. "Let's go then, kohai."

He spun her around in her cramped little bathroom and kissed her breathless. "As you command, sempai."

Yasu weaves under the crossed lines of yellow tape; they wave a little as the air shifts with her passing. Inside the compound is dead still. She walks silent streets, remembering the crowds of clan members swirling through byways, the packs of children tearing wildly around corners before stopping abruptly to bow ever so formally to the clan elders as the men paced by, wrinkled lips turned down at the exuberance, but their eyes laughing.

A month of rain hasn't washed out all the blood. It lingers in limp awnings and the ripped washi on crushed shoji doors. She ends up at a small building pressed up against the compound wall, elegant and delicate. Yasu kneels in the entrance and takes off her sandals. She goes barefoot into the living space, and sinks to her knees again by the stains on the boards.

She had wanted to be their daughter. She hadn't told Toshio, because he so loved complaining of his clan. But she wanted a family - a son and a daughter of her own, but a family to raise them in as well. Toshio's mother, Uchiha Tomiko was a fierce woman; a chuunin with two tomoe in her sharingan and a spine of steel. Uchiha Hideo, also a chuunin, never activated his sharingan; neither had much standing in the clan. But what they lacked in status they made up for in kindness. The children swarmed their house after Academy let out, for Hideo's famous cookies and for Toshiko's motherly lessons with kunai. It was a family she would have been proud to be part of. Perhaps the Uchiha parents would have been as proud of her as their daughter as they were of Toshio, their tokubetsu jounin son with his fully developed sharingan bloodline. She thought she would have been a good match for Toshio in the clan's eyes. No bloodline to dilute the sharingan; but a powerful shinobi. No family to make alliance with, but Toshio was not important enough for a political marriage anyway. Yet Toshio had laughed and prevaricated, and she was too scared to push him. He was the only person left in the world that she loved, and if the question of marriage might scare him away, she would never ask it. Without him, Yasu would have nothing.

Toshio is dead. Yasu has nothing. The dry sobs come again, and she folds over onto her hands and knees beside the place her former-future-parents-in-law have died. Her right hand throbs and sparks. She grinds it into the floor until the pain grounds her enough that even grief can't pull her away.

She's here, she's caught in the now, so she hears the door slide open and tiny feet plant themselves furiously in the entry. "You can't be here."

The child's voice is raw; it breaks halfway through the words. She leans aside to avoid the first kunai that slices through the air towards her back; catches the second in her good hand as she turns and knocks the rest to the floor with the weapon. He only has five in his training holster; she catches the rock he throws next in her injured hand and thinks dully that maybe she'll have to go to the medics for the fracture; the flesh has swollen, her first two fingers won't close all the way.

The child is shaking. His eyes are red-the whites, not the irises, from tears, not chakra. He casts about for another weapon, opening his mouth to shout again. Sasuke, she remembers. Mikoto's child. The clan head's younger son. The only survivor. "Shut up," she says to him, glaring with hard, dry eyes at this little Uchiha. Her voice is as rough as his own.

His eyes narrow, and he draws a deep breath. "Get out!" he screams at her. It echoes in the emptiness. A few crows, drawn by the old blood and not yet having discovered the lack of meat, take flight outside the entrance in startlement.

Yasu throws the rock at him. She throws it hard and fast and he's damned lucky her hand is broken and fucking lucky she didn't use the kunai. He twists barely in time; the sharp edge scores across his forehead leaving a trail of blood rather than a dent in his skull. Redness drips down into his eye. Yasu realizes that she's just attacked the only surviving Uchiha. She's nearly killed Toshio's only living relative.

He puts an arm to his forehead, soaking the blood into the dark fabric of his sleeve. They watch each other in silence. Yasu speaks first, sheathing his small kunai with her own. "Let me grieve, boy." She doesn't want him here. Doesn't want the reminder of what she'll never have, the son (would she have been a daughter?) who never even got buried. Her child, who would have grown into wild black hair like this one, sharp dark eyes and pale skin. Maybe her child would have had a rounder face, a smaller nose, the thick eyebrows she had inherited from her own father. But he would have been an Uchiha, through and through, Toshio's son, Hideo and Tomiko's grandson, this boy's cousin-of-some-sort.

Her nephew, she thinks. This boy, this Sasuke, was almost her nephew.

"It's my family," he hisses. "You don't belong here." He's looking at her brown hair, the soft moon of her face that has not a hint of Uchiha angles and edges. She's alive, and that is itself enough to brand her an outsider.

"My family, too," she whispers, to herself, to the dead of this house whom she loved. Loves still, though it makes her heart scream like standing on a shattered knee.

Sasuke stands stiffly in the entrance, arm clamped over his face. He's willing her to leave. Yasu shuffles over to him until they are face to face. Their eyes are on a level, with the rise up from the foyer and her still on her knees. He drops his arm to meet her gaze solidly. "Mine," he whispers, and Yasu knows he heard her.

Her head drifts forward until they meet, and his blood smears over her brow. Sasuke can't back away with her hands clamped over his shoulders, chakra thrumming through her fingertips though her right hand shakes. "Uchiha Toshio was mine, Sasuke. He was mine and I belonged to him. Uchiha Hideo, Uchiha Tomiko, Uchiha Teyaki," she says the surname each time as she lists the people she loved and knew and cared about as friends. She says the names and he flinches each time as if she is driving a knife into his body but she doesn't let go and she doesn't stop. "…Uchiha Yakumi. And Toshio, Uchiha Toshio, he was _mine._

"I had a baby," she tells him. Her eyes have sunk closed and she can't stop the words she's saying to this little child. "He was an Uchiha, too. So do not tell me that I _do not belong here._" Her hands spasm on his shoulders and the pain rushes up her arm and sinks to the pair of fresh scars mirrored on her belly and back and so much worse on the inside. It sets them afire.

Sasuke, who hasn't moved throughout the litany, reaches up and grabs her forearms with tiny hands. Yasu can feel hot liquid on her cheeks, but it's only Sasuke's blood seeping down the ridge of her nose and tracing the hollows under her eyes.

When their grips loosen, the red trails have dried and Sasuke is leaning against her chest. He looks like he's been crying blood, but the slice on his head has clotted. It was deep; Yasu wonders absently if it will scar. He won't be able to hide it the way she's hidden hers; the marks of senbon sealed with acid that pockmarked and melted half her forehead are curtained away by long-cut bangs. One eyelid can't open fully, but a lazy, half-lidded look and hair longer on the left means she doesn't draw second glances. At least not until the first kiss.

Toshio had never cared. He'd looked, and he'd touched, but then he'd kissed the ravaged skin and worked his way back to her lips and she'd forgotten all about the brands of failure.

"I'm going to kill him," Sasuke murmurs into her collarbones.

She laughs a little, not particularly amused. "I might get there first, little one," she whispers back into his oily hair. Why else would her destination after being released from the hospital have been ANBU? One detour first, not looking anywhere but at the closet and the box tucked away at the back from where she dug out the slim, tasseled scroll she'd been handed a year ago and, at the time, politely declined to accept. Then Yasu had gone straight to headquarters, and waited, empty-eyed, until she could place the summons on the desk of the Director. "I accept," she had said.

He had turned the rolled silk over and over between the fingers of one hand. "An invitation ten months overdue," he said softly. "Why come to us now?"

She's good. She knows it, and the recruiters for ANBU knew it. She had wanted a family, wanted a life and a child with Toshio, so when they'd asked she'd said no. Now she has one wish left, and that wish is to destroy Uchiha Itachi the way he'd destroyed her.

She wants to sink her blade into his stomach and pin him to the wall like a butterfly, like a pregnant woman bleeding her three-month quick baby onto the floor. She wants to twist the steel in his belly, to pluck his ruby eyes from his skull and pop them in her fists, burn the sockets while he screams in blinded agony. She wants it in the same place she wanted to fuck Toshio on lonely nights sleeping in fireless camps of windswept border patrols.

It's all in the words she breathes onto the dirty mats of Sasuke's inky hair. "I might get there first."

His hands turn into fists against her. "He'll kill you," the boy says, matter of fact. "I'm the only one who can beat him."

This time her laugh is short and harsh and startled.

"I am," he insists. "I will." He moves, as if to push her away and her arms clench involuntarily.

She considers letting go, in the long seconds after they both freeze. But Yasu doesn't want him to leave. She doesn't want to be alone again in the house of her dead baby's dead father's dead parents. She doesn't want to be alone in her head with her grief and her rage and her blood-soaked fantasies of Uchiha Itachi.

The Director had ordered a psychological examination. "I do not make a habit of filling my ranks with suicidal nin," he had said flatly. "Or with those who will be a liability." She'd had to think hard to make the right muscles move, reconstructing the expression from memory, but after a long moment, she had smiled at him.

She would pass the evaluation, when it came time. She wan't suicidal; she had no intention of dying before the Uchiha. ANBU was a stepping stone; a training ground where she would prepare to kill the thirteen-year-old who had killed everyone who mattered.

"I'll get stronger," Sasuke mutters. "I'll get stronger than he is. I can hate him enough, and when I find him, I will destroy him."

He's warm in her arms, solid and breathing and alive against her body. She could break him so very easily. She could snap his fragile neck in a bare second. She could pulse her chakra through her hands where they rest against his back and shatter the wide bones of his shoulder blades. His heart flutters underneath his soft skin that shields a body still rounded with baby fat.

Yasu doesn't say anything. She tucks her chin down on top of his head and closes her eyes. She will stay here as long as she can, holding this last person who means anything. She will stay until the world calls her out, until ANBU takes her under its dark, ragged wings. Going back isn't an option; there is nowhere to go back to.

It doesn't matter who kills him. If she fails, maybe Sasuke will succeed. But somehow, someday, Uchiha Itachi will die.


End file.
